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Role description

Software Engineering Intern

Nessie logoNessieYC F25
AI-native
TypeInternship
SeniorityIntern
SponsorshipNo visa sponsorship
Salary$48,000–$96,000
LocationSan Francisco, CA
Posted10/26/2026
Engineering

We’re looking for an intern who can build. You’ll work directly with the founders on the shared context layer for recursive companies: a data lake that ingests everything a team produces with AI, an ontology that turns it into trustworthy, typed knowledge, and the loop that lets people and agents improve from it.

We’re a team of two, so you’ll ship to production from your first week. There are no toy projects. You’ll work in the real codebase, own features end to end, and see how users actually use what you built.

What "build" means here

  • You have shipped something real: a side project, a hackathon build that people actually used, a tool you made for yourself and still use every day. You’ve gone from nothing to working software at least once.
  • You are comfortable learning a new stack quickly. We ship native desktop apps on macOS, Windows, and Linux, a CLI and background daemon, agent integrations, and a cloud backend, across several languages. You don’t need experience in all of these. You do need to pick things up fast.
  • You reach for AI tools instinctively (Claude Code, Cursor, Codex) and you’re faster because of it. If your first instinct under pressure is to stare at the code instead of handing it to an agent, this isn’t the right fit.

What you might work on

You’ll own one or two of these, scoped to what you can ship during the internship:

  • Ingestion: a new source connector, from AI chat apps and coding agents to meeting recorders, notes apps, and email. Cross-provider capture is still the hardest unsolved problem in the space.
  • Search and retrieval: making thousands of sessions and documents queryable in milliseconds, across local and cloud.
  • Self-improving agents: measuring skill invocations, mining agent traces for failures and repeated workflows, and proposing reviewable edits back to a team’s skills.
  • Agent-facing surfaces: our CLI, MCP connector, and plugins, so any AI tool can reach a team’s accumulated context.
  • Ontology: derived fields, conflict resolution, and keeping the live state of a company current as new work flows in.
  • Product polish: the user experience, from first launch through the features people use every day.

What you will NOT need

  • A specific degree, major, or school
  • A prior internship
  • A perfect resume
  • Permission to try things

What you will need

  • The instinct to ship before it’s perfect
  • Autonomy. You’ll get context, feedback, and fast answers from the founders, but no one will hand you a detailed spec. You get a problem and you figure out how to solve it.
  • Opinions about the products you use. If you’ve never looked at an app and thought “this is wrong and here’s how I’d fix it,” we’re probably not a match.
  • Comfort with ambiguity. The product moves fast, and what matters in week 1 may differ from week 6. That should excite you.

What we offer

  • $4K–$8K per month
  • Expensed meals in office
  • Flight stipend to come to SF
  • Daily work alongside the founders, with code review and mentorship on everything you ship
  • A clear path to a full-time offer for interns who do great work

Relevant archetypes

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Company info

Nessie logo

Nessie

The shared context layer for recursive companies.

Pre-seedYC F25Brand new
Founded2025
HQSan Francisco, United States
Size1–10 employees
Industry
Technology, Information and Internet
Latest fundingPre-seed · Dec 3, 2025
Investors
Y CombinatorPioneer Fund

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